Question of the Week: Do I Support President Obama’s Policy of Drone Executions, Particularly for American Citizens?

This is probably the most difficult question that I’ve received. I’m not an expert on the legal issues, I’m not an expert on defense issues, and I don’t even have any strong gut instincts.

On the pro side, I suspect the world is a better place every time a drone wipes out a nest of terrorists. And that’s true even when the casualties include traitorous Americans.

I’m glad terrorists are nervously looking up, but…

On the anti side, every good libertarian worries about the slippery slope of government expansion. So even though I’m somewhat happy about terrorists getting zapped today, I don’t like to think about who might be targeted by politicians 30 years from now.

Part of the problem is that governments grab additional powers during wartime, and it’s very difficult to unwind those powers once hostilities cease.

And to make matters more challenging, we’re now fighting a war that presumably will never end.

Yes, we can probably ameliorate the problem by reducing American interventionism, but I strongly suspect that radical Islamists also hate us because of our tolerant values and secular system. So we’ll still face a serious threat of terrorist attacks even with a perfect libertarian foreign policy.

I guess the only answer I can provide is that I want plenty of independent judicial oversight. No, that’s not a panacea, but it’s at least some form of check and balance on the executive branch.

I think the judiciary branch of government must be included in a decision to use this kind of force. It’s a bit more than a search warrant.. In a nation that we have not declared war on, it is a declaration of war. Bottomline, OK in Afganistan, not out of it’s borders without the approval of the local government.

Mr. Mitchell, Thank you. As an American abroad this sort of thing sends a chill up my spine. Yes, I’m 99% sure that the only targets here are and will be terrorists but I still want oversight. The Executive branch should not be the only one making decisions about taking the lives of American citizens just because that citizen is not on U.S. soil.

And there is a certain irony about all of this since one of the arguments of homelanders for citizenship-based taxation is the “protection” that we supposedly receive from the homeland. As one of my readers so eloquently put it, “So Americans abroad must file taxes so that they can finance their possible murder without a fair trial by the US government. That’s the “benefit” of being a US citizen. Thanks but no thanks.”

In summary: At the current low level of American civilian casualties to terrorism, I do NOT support the drone strikes. Their cost in terms of degrading deeply held American values, does not justify the benefit.

Of course, I do understand that other people may make a different quantitative assessment based on past life experiences and proximity to the consequences. But remember that most big quarrels stem from differences in quantitative assessments. After all, most voter-lemmings, except the truly delusional ones, understand that the flattening of the effort-reward curves involved in HopNChange will result in lower motivation and lower production. They just don’t think that they are enough to push America past the tipping point into a decline spiral. They think that America still has a sizable margin in its advantage to the rest of the world and they think that competitiveness is more or less linear, ie your productivity goes down 20%, you sell 20% less, you maintain 80% of your prosperity. I don’t, and think that the decline cycle that started by electing Obama to correct Bush is irreversible.

But back on drone strikes…

First I have to state that I’m a believer in the fact that utility ultimately drives morals, not the other way around, but one must consider long term utility to come to the right conclusions. The world may be a safer place, as Mr Mitchell points out, every time a drone kills a group of terrorists and possibly their families. But is it a safer world in the long term?

So freedom is moral because, in the longer term, it creates the most prosperity and thus dominates in the general dynamics of cultural evolution, whether you like it or not. Cultures that have morals of freedom succeed and dominate, the others fade away. Of course, almost by definition, natural selection needs its dead evolutionary branches, and I think that is the path western world voter-lemmings are trending to.

So when I say that the current level of American terrorist casualties is low, I do not count military casualties (which by the way, are also low). I think there is something deeply flawed and vulnerable to great abuse when one country can engage in war to kill without any danger of casualties herself. If you do not feel strongly enough about an issue to accept risk on your own life, then you should not go to war to kill. Apart from the abuse danger in doing so, you are also likely to trigger such great resentment (here is the long term utility effect) that you will eventually be brought down, be it by outright war, or by economic attrition from having to invest large proportions of your vitality to the rather economically inefficient task of defending yourself militarily. In short, America may be free (well less by the day) and may be strong (less so bybthe day since it grows at a slower rate than the world average). But America cannot pick a fight with the entire world and remain most prosperous. On its current trajectory of copy-Europe economic decline, it is risking becoming both overtaken militarily AND hated at the same time. Not a good combination.

Finally, support for such measures as drone strikes depends on the perceived differential in moral standing between the combatants. How would you feel if Canada used drones to target its enemies ? What if France did the same? Argentina? Venezuela? Cuba? N Korea? where does the support fade?
How do you feel that the statist Obama apparatus is the one pulling the trigger? Isn’t that a bit more discomforting?

So as America’s standing as defender of freedom wanes, so does the differential in its moral standing to terrorists, and so does my support. The American drone strikes are starting to look more and more like French drone strikes, intended to ultimately defend the values of liberte’, but also mandatory egalite’, and mandatory fraternite’. These are noble values and morals of decline, so my support also wanes. I know there is no future outside the successful dominant branch in the evolutionary tree of cultures.

“a thuggish IRS”? Uh, Dan, the IRS would be thuggish even if the tax code had just one page. Without credible threats and intimidation, who other than dupes would pay voluntarily to support a government of arrogant imperialists, I mean, republicans and federalists? You might have to resort to tariffs to support your precious government, but how would you square tariffs with your facile rhetoric about free markets? Those, too, are paid only because of intimidation and thuggishness.

So maybe you could finance your government through the sale of lands under its control. I think this trick was used in the 1700s and 1800s, although this means, too, is tainted with thuggishness, for it was by thuggishness that the land was collectivized.

It’s by the way that the DC and nearby areas have numerous nests of terrorists. You conceded this yourself with “American interventionism” and “thuggish IRS”. The latter phrase suggests also that the IRS is a domestic terrorism organization, although a few people had figgerd this out already, thank you very much. Anyhow, your ethics and your own words entail the conclusion that “the world” would be “a better place every time a drone wipes out a nest of [Columbian] terrorists” in the DC or its nearby areas.

It’s difficult not to agree with you about “terrorists getting zapped”. Still, wouldn’t it be less messy to abolish by other means the plundering crime organization set up the by great Founding Fathers? Think of what a B-61 would do to your heroes’ precious imperial capital even if the terrorists’ bomb were set to a low yield and delivered at low altitude by one of the terrorists’ drones. Is that what you want your legacy to be?

So, why aren’t radical Islamists chanting “Death to Switzerland”, or attacking Swiss soldiers stationed in their countries, given that Switzerland is a more tolerant and free country than America today? Could the answer really be as easy as that they can’t find any Swiss soldiers in their countries? No, obviously the lives of Muslims are fueled by hate and this mysterious source of energy, only available to Muslims, somehow puts food on their tables and creates big, cohesive families for drones to take a bite out of.

Here’s my suggestion: Let us stipulate that we abide by the Constitution; Congress must declare war, and only when Congress declares war shall the President/Executive Branch have the power to execute American citizens who are traitors/and or a threat to This country. By so doing, we respect the Constitutional separation of powers.

The US government needs to mind its own affairs and stop killing citizens in other countries. If the US were not inserting itself into other country’s politics, they would have a lot less reason to hate us. But when we bring down their governments and prop up hated puppet dictatorships, we should not be surprised at the blow back. We brought it on ourselves.

The issue isn’t who politicians will kill 30 years from now. The issue is who politicians are killing today. You must have glossed over President Obama’s assassination of 3 US citizens in 2011… one of whom was a 16 year old boy who had never committed a terrorist act. His only “wrong” was being the son of a suspected terrorist.

If we were so sure Anwar al-Awlaki was a terrorist, would it really have been that hard to get congressional approval or get a court sentence?

This power of the President which is delegated to other “competent” person of “authority” to make the determination whether or not a U.S. Citizen should be killed is very chilling as Victoria says.

The US is always launching new wars that never end, like the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, and now the latest, the War on Offshore Tax Evasion (Woote). Before long, the definition of who is a terrorist and what activity is considered terror will morph to include those that failed to file an FBAR or FATCA form as financial terror against the Homeland society because you have not informed them of your global financial assets or something similar absurdity. I know that is hyperbolic and seems silly, but where is the end of that slippery slope?

Look how easily we redefine terminology, to the place now that WMD from the Sadam war of preemption now applies to a guy with a fast loading single shot rifle. Look at NDAA and all those mushy assertions of what they can do in the name of security…”permits the military to detain anyone, including U.S. citizens, who “substantially support”—an undefined legal term—al-Qaida, the Taliban or “associated forces,” again a term that is legally undefined. Those detained can be imprisoned indefinitely by the military and denied due process until “the end of hostilities.” And when to hostilities end? Never!

In the case of taxation, where the U.S. asserts it rights to impose Citizenship taxation a very broad category of “U.S. Persons” regardless of where they live on the globe. There is no easy escape from the tentacles of this monster. U.S Person is an ever changing definition that gets broader everyday when our “freedom and liberty” loving government is looking for new tax revenues. With FATCA it is now extorting all Financial Institutions in the world to spy and report on them. With such thuggery, no wonder we continue to create enemies, including our own citizens abroad who we can now just blithely call terrorist if we want!

I definitely do not like the road we are on, and wonder what kind of an Orwellian world is in our ‘not to distant’ future.

[…] from the Internet that fuels their hate and provides knowledge on how to conduct attacks. I’m rather sympathetic to drone attacks on the scum in the Middle East who are directly seeking to instigate/plan terrorism, but I […]